Vid Znidarsic – Non-alignment

Non-alignment

STRANGERS DUAL THE BASICS CLOUDS SEDIMENTATION

1

Non-alignment:

STRANGERS

Whitstable, 20th of April 2019 Lobster shells, no fries.

1 STRANGERS (Vignette: 3 minutes, 59 seconds) ■

I remember meeting ‘D’ for the first time sometime before New Year’s.

I started a conversation once I ordered a single macchiato. He explained that he was from Slovakia and he seemed very happy about the fact that I was Slovenian.

He also told me he was in Ljubljana in 1991 (‘When we gained independence’ I added) and expressed how positively surprised he was about it. The next time I stopped at his cart I overslept so by the time I got there it was already around 11:30 AM. I got a strange sense of accusation from him when he asked me something along the lines of: ‘Oh, but this surely isn’t your first coffee today, is it?’

After that, I kept passing by ‘D’s coffee-cart and every time I felt a bit guilty for not stopping by so I consciously avoided him. I even remember that once when he was looking my way (and surely he would not remember me) I quickly turned around and looked the other way as if not ordering coffee would be something to be ashamed of. After a while, not really sure why, I decided to give it another go.

On Tuesday I stopped by his cart again.

‘Single macchiato with a bit more milk please.’

While waiting for my coffee, he asked: ‘Where are you from?’

It appeared like he could sense a Slav inside of me. Almost as he could smell that we share something in common.

‘Slovenia.’ (Again.)

‘I was there, in 1991 I think.’

‘Ljubljana?’

I already knew the answer but I asked anyway.

‘Yes!’

2 ‘That’s when we gained our independence!’ (Again.)

‘Already?’

‘Yup, and afterwards Croatians followed and all hell broke loose at the Balkans…’

‘We became independent in 1993…’

I guess my coffee was ready at that point.

‘Cash or card?’

I paid 2 pounds and 30 pence.

‘How do you say? Hvala?’

‘Yes, exactly! Do you speak Slovenian?’

‘No just a few words from here and there….’

‘How do you say it?’ ‘Ďakujem.’ ‘Čau!’

‘Ďakujem.’ ‘Čau!’

We waived to each other and I headed off.

It felt good. Really good.

As if I found a long lost friend, or someone that you already forgot about and then by a mere chance you bump into and you both get genuinely excited, or someone you had some bitter memories of but then once you meet them after some time it feels like everything has been long forgotten and you can be friends again.

No, it actually felt even better, it felt as if I ran into a complete stranger in the middle of the place that none of us related to but we shared something in common. To any other stranger, there would be no difference between ‘D’ and me, but we were the only ones who knew about every single thing that set us apart, which was strangely exactly what connected us. And it felt so familiar and warm when I said ‘Čau’ and he understood it. It was a great feeling.

I could not remember when I felt so enthusiastic and thrilled for the last time.

Whitstable, 20th of April 2019 Lobster shells, no fries.

3 STRANGERS (Rumination: 3 minutes, 59 seconds ) ■

Both ‘D’ and I are strangers on several different levels.

Firstly, the fact that we both come from different countries (Slovakia and Slovenia respectively) from the one we operate in (The United Kingdom) makes us strangers to society by definition: ‘One who belongs to another country, a foreigner; chiefly (now exclusively), one who resides in or comes to a country to which he is a foreigner; an alien.’ 1 Secondly, ‘D’ and I are strangers to one another. Or to be more precise, we were strangers to one another, before making an acquaintance – since a stranger is usually considered an individual who does not know and is not familiarised with another individual and vice versa. If one stranger crosses paths with another stranger it does not matter if the encounter happened already before, the inability to remember each other is inherent to the relationship between them.

Yet, possibly the most accurate description of how ‘D’ and myself fit into a category of strangers lies in Georg Simmel’s writing The Stranger: ‘The concept of “the stranger” suggests that foreignness is a psycho-cultural as well as a geographical matter. A stranger is not a wanderer, who may come today and leave tomorrow. He comes today – and stays. He is a potential wanderer: although he has not moved on from the society, he has not quite shed the freedom to stay or go, either.

He remains within a specific place, but he has not always belonged to it, and so he carries into it qualities that do not, could not, belong there.’ 2 According to Simmel, a stranger is caught in between, he is not here nor there.

He does not belong to that nor to this place. In a way, a stranger is not aligned with any place, time or situation. The non-alignment, in this case, can be, as mentioned already, present on several levels: individually (a stranger to someone) or collectively (a stranger to his surroundings, an alien not belonging to the site).

4 What is the most striking when one analyses the relationship between ‘D’ and myself is the fact that precisely the (partial) non-alignment with any of, or with the sum of, these different external factors (such as place, culture, identity, politics, language, set of values, memories…) is what unites and connects us. The fact that the two individuals who both recognize themselves as being strangers to others and as such feel out of place in relation to society gives them an ability to connect with one another even though they might be considered strangers on an individual level just moments ago.

What is more, the connection between individuals who in certain circumstances feel a sense of belonging – such as both being Slavic and sharing a level of intelligibility in a case of ‘D’ and myself – can sometimes be limited to a certain space or a situation. Meeting ‘D’ in any of our respective countries would probably result in considering one another a stranger (in this case individually) and would not manifest in a friendship.

The non-alignment of ‘D’ and myself – which makes us strangers – is what unites us.

‘Stranger, n. (and adj.)’, in Oxford English Dictionary [online], <https://www.oed.com/view/ Entry/191250?rskey=bpXcJr&result=2&isAdvanced=false> [accessed April 21, 2020].

1

Georg Simmel and Ramona Mosse, ‘The Stranger’, The Baffler, 30 (2016), 176-179 (p. 176) <www.jstor.org/ stable/43959216> [Accessed 21 April 2020].

2

Whitstable, 20th of April 2019 Lobster shells, no fries.

Whitstable, 20th of April 2019 Lobster shells, no fries.

2

Non-alignment:

DUAL

London, 3rd of October 2019 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 11th of March 2020 The inability to remember.

1 DUAL (Vignette: 4 minutes, 3 seconds) ■

‘Dober dan Vid!’ He remembered my name, which was a big deal. Mainly because it meant that he remembered me. It also sounded good. English native speakers usually mispronounce my name somehow missing the fact there is an ‘i’ in between the two letters, but his pronunciation sounded right – direct, unambiguous and a bit harsh.

I came prepared. A day before, when I got home, I googled ‘How to speak Slovak?’ and watched a short video about it. It was a native Briton living in Slovakia and his colleague, a native Slovak, both working on an international radio station.

‘Dobrý deň, is it?’

He seemed impressed, and I think he did not see through my little trick. But I cannot really tell why I did that – why after a rather long day I went out of my way and spend ten minutes watching a video about a foreign language because of a brief encounter in the morning. At least I do not have a rational explanation for that. I guess I felt that we established a special bond.

We compared mutually intelligible words and somehow stumbled upon the concept of dual.

‘It changes the verb and noun! If you use the verb “to be”, you would say: “ jaz sem” as in “I am”, “midva sva” as in “the two of us are” or “mi smo” as “we – more than two – are”. See how the verb changes?’

I tried to be as clear as possible with explaining this, but I am not sure I was very successful. I also explained this to ‘G’ later on at school and she was slightly more enthusiastic.

‘Oh, I see… Nope, we don’t do that. We have only the polite way of referring to someone who is older or you respect…’

‘Ah yes, same! Do you do it in the plural in the 2nd person?’

2 ‘Yes, like French “Vous” … It is a common concept across languages, the Italians use “Lei” for example, which is different…’

I learnt that he speaks bits of every Slavic language and some Italian and French.

I realized that our conversations exceeded superficial small talk; we were exchanging experiences of the city and our memories, we were talking about a place that one calls home, discussing how one communicates, thinks, feels, remembers… Through our differences and similarities, we were strengthening our bond.

While I got lost in my thoughts for a second he did a peculiar gesture: one leg extended in front of him, the other firmly on the ground he nodded his head and did a tiny bow – in a way young gentlemen invites a lady for a dance in a period drama. He had a big smile on his face and concluded our discussion with: ‘This is for “Vous” Mr Vid!’ And handed me the coffee.

I smiled back, paid 2 pounds and 20 pence and continued my way since our time – measured in preparation of a macchiato-with-a-bit-more-milk – was up and I was late – as usual.

I have been paying 2 pounds and 20 pence ever since our second encounter. It is interesting how the price drop of 10 pence indicated the start of our friendshipto-be.

London, 3rd of October 2019 – 11th of March 2020 The inability to remember.

3 DUAL (Rumination: 4 minutes, 25 seconds) ■

To put it simply; in languages that use dual as a grammatical number, when referring to precisely two subjects, nouns, pronouns and verbs change and become different as they would be in either singular or plural form. This curiosity, a remnant of an ancient Proto-European language survived – at least to a degree – in some ancient languages but prevailed only in a handful of modern ones, Slovenian being one of them. The importance of dual, however, does not lie in its rich history or complexity it provides to the language, as Lenček suggests: ‘The meaning of “midva” and its paradigm and, for that matter, of any other dual construction in Slovene, goes beyond simply ‘we-two-inclusive of those to whom the forms refers’. “Midva” represents an essential ‘we-two-ness‘, a shade of duality to be best defined perhaps as ‘we-two-alone’, ‘we-two-exclusive of all others’, which in our definition of the grammatical category of dual brings into focus a new semantic element - the stress on a unity of two, the insistence on ‘two-ness.’ 3 Despite being just a grammatical category, dual allows a speaker to express subtle nuances, especially in terms of inclusion and intimacy. At the same time, the inability to emphasise the inclusion or exclusion of only certain two people that a speaker wants to subtly express creates a frustration, a certain handicap, a nonalignment in language that has no translatable equivalent. No matter how long and what kind the explanation is, it can never replace ‘midva’, ‘naju’, ‘sva’ or any other form of dual for that matter.

Since the concept of ‘two-ness’ and ‘intimacy’ might appear too personal when talking to someone you are merely acquainted with I can understand in hindsight why my explanation of dual to ‘D’ was not utterly successful. The fact that ‘D’ misunderstood dual as a language device used to express respect or politeness (equivalent to the French ‘Vous’) shows that the significance of dual does not lie in the ability to express the exact number when referring to two subjects, but rather in the idea that precisely two subjects create a fundamentally distinct relationship to either a single or multiple subjects. Slovene poet Dane Zajc furthermore states:

4 ‘If a Slovene wants to keep secret his intimacy with another, he uses the plural. He does not say, “The two of us were together”, but instead, “We were together”. By a purely grammatical sleight of hand, he adds a third or a fourth person and so masks the intimate two in the plural. He creates the impression that the two were actually three, or four, or more, and in that constellation his relation with the other shifts from the intimate to the public. So in fact that are sometimes grounds for suspecting this “twosome” of secret intimacies, treacherously hidden from the third.’ 4 Which sheds a light on another important aspect of dual: dual has the ability to shift the focus of the visible to the hidden, and in this way can make transparent opaque and vice versa. Therefore, one can, through talking about the inclusion of someone or something, actually emphasise the exclusion of everyone else.

Dual is, as such, a form of non-alignment, since talking in dual is, in essence, talking in non-plural. However, the question remains: should I have the available language to communicate in dual, would I at any point feel close enough to ‘D’ to refer to us as ‘midva’ or would we stay ambiguously ‘we’?

Rado L. Lenček, ‘On Poetic Functions of the Grammatical Category of Dual’, Studies in Slavic and General Linguistics, 2 (1982), 193-210 (p. 202) <www.jstor.org/stable/40996890> [Accessed 22 April 2020].

London,

3

Dane Zajc, ‘On Dual’, Studies in Slavic and General Linguistics, 2 (1982), 211-214 (p. 213) <www.jstor.org/ stable/40996890> [Accessed 22 April 2020].

4

3rd of October 2019 – 11th of March 2020 The inability to remember.

London, 3rd of October 2019 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 11th of March 2020 The inability to remember.

3

Non-alignment:

THE BASICS

London, 31th of January 2020 First-ever message exchange with ‘G’: ‘The man the myth the legend’

1 THE BASICS (Vignette: 4 minutes, 6 seconds) ■

Since our second encounter, our bond was well established. Our communication started to resemble an elaborate collage of languages – Slovenian, Slovak, SerboCroatian, Russian, French, Italian and English. Exchanging words, learning from one another, comparing our cultures, complaining over British people and Brexit, commenting on the storm that might or might not happen (and is, therefore, be better safe than sorry and use a rope to attach the price list to the coffee cart since it has already happened that the wind would blow it away in the middle of the traffic) we were becoming close. Not as close as one would be with his friend, but much closer than one would be with a total stranger.

At the same time, I felt a bit silly occupying myself with this and giving it so much thought. I am not sure why I tried to learn his language, why I felt guilty when I passed by the cart and did not stop for a coffee or why it genuinely made my day when I had my morning exchange with ‘D’. It might be the joy of discovering a stranger that becomes a familiar, friend-like figure (that you know at the same time nothing about, yet so much) in an environment where everyone else feels so disconnected. And then and there you can share something.

I was thinking a lot about it lately: What would happen if I met ‘D’ outside of the realm of his coffee cart, wearing something different than his apron and a beanie. It seems like our bond could exist precisely on that spot for an exact duration of preparing a coffee. As if there are certain conditions that have to be fulfilled in order to connect and share these moments.

We also never discussed our lives outside of our site of daily discussions. He never asked where I worked and I only had simple, undemanding questions – how his cart actually works for example. We did not speak about families, where we live or our background. Our bond did not extend to our life outside that place. It felt like Sting’s song, Englishman In New York – but turned upside down.

2 I don’t take coffee, I take tea, my dear I like my toast done on one side And you can hear it in my accent when I talk I’m an Englishman in New York 5 We both preferred coffee over tea. Both aliens, legal aliens. Two Slavs in London, full of Englishmen rushing by.

‘Počasie?’

‘What? Slow?’

‘No, weather… How do you say weather?’

‘Vreme.’

Our invented mode of communication went on and I could sense that it was as amusing for him as it was for me. I tried to explain what I feel towards this new friendship I managed to forge to my friends and to ‘Č’ as well; everyone seemed to find it intriguing, exciting, funny. ‘T’ even claimed I was becoming obsessed with it.

Reflecting on our everyday encounters I became more alert on all the things surrounding me. I am certain that through our talks I started to understand myself a bit better.

‘You know; I think we could do without the use of English…’

‘I think we will.’

London, 31th of January 2020 5

First-ever message exchange with ‘G’: ‘The man the myth the legend’

Sting, Englishman in New York, (A&M Records, 13 October 1987) [on CD].

3 THE BASICS (Rumination: 4 minutes, 12 seconds) ■

In 1961 the Non-Aligned Movement was established in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, as a counterweight to the division to the Eastern and Western blocks of the Cold War and as a response to the colonial issues across the world.6 While the whole world was divided by the iron curtain on the set of binaries of East and West, capitalism and communism, good and evil; the third, alternative route that has been almost forgotten by today, opened up new possibilities for the countries not belonging to either. Nowadays the non-aligned movement represents one of the largest international organizations (second only to the United Nations), including the majority of African, Asian and South American countries.7 Yet, the significance of the non-aligned movement lies beyond its political goals and efforts to end the world hegemony; abolish imperialism, colonialism and racism;8 shift the conflict from East-West towards North-South and thus empower the Third World;9 advocate for global justice and peace;10 and enable socio-economic development of the included member states.11 The possibilities non-alignment provides are not so much political, as they are philosophical and psychological. Non-alignment allows for a shift and disruption of the accepted paradigms, as Gopal suggests: ‘From the start, non-alignment has been an attitude of mind […] throughout, it has had what one might call a psychological aspect, a common way of looking at the world and its problems.’ 12 This, alongside a certain feeling of postmemory,13 is probably the most striking feature that spawned my initial interest in the matter. However, my postmemory was not traumatic at all, as Marianne Hirsch suggests one should be, but a rather nostalgic sentiment towards the period I have never experienced – of Yugoslavia and the non-aligned movement, developed through personal stories of ‘H’s and ‘I’s youth, testimonies of comradery, better times, youth work brigades, Tito’s Blue Train, and historical accounts of Nasser, Nehru and Tito, the founding fathers of the movement.

4 Why I started thinking about childhood and collective memories, notions of identities, strangers, sedimentation, inability to remember or to be understood, interweaving them between themselves and projecting them onto ‘D’, I cannot really say with certainty. However, I suspect that it was a possibility I recognized in the ideology of the non-aligned movement, that I tried to translate to a possible mode of operating that allows one to misalign oneself in the everyday.

‘Until 1994 it [non-aligned movement] had no permanent secretariat and thus no specific physical locus. Organizational tasks were carried out by a constantly shifting ensemble of actors consisting of engaged governments, diplomats and movement organs.’14 Notes Dinkel, explaining a peculiarity of the organization. I think that this is exactly the same mode that strangers, clouds, people speaking in dual, and seashells in the middle of vineyard far away from where they came from, operate in – being in constant flux, belonging to this and that place at the same time, yet to neither really, embracing their non-alignment.

Taking everything into account, non-alignment transcended the framework of an ideological movement and its political implications for me. It rather became a methodology that allowed me to think through everyday encounters and as a consequence, I believe it was the reason why I recognized significance in my conversations with ‘D’.

I saw the attitude of non-alignment in ‘D’ and I related to it.

Samaan Boutros Farajalla, ‘Non-alignment: Ideological Pluralism’, India Quarterly, v. 40 n. 2 (1984), 198-206 (p. 203) <https://www.jstor.org/stable/45071966> [Accessed 21 April 2020].

6

Jürgen Dinkel, The Non-Aligned Movement: Genesis, Organization and Politics (1927– 1992) (Leiden: Brill, 2019).

7

Sarvepalli Gopal, ‘What is non-alignment?’, India International Centre Quarterly, v. 3 n. 3 (1976), 3-7 (p. 6) <https://www.jstor.org/stable/23001997> [Accessed 21 April 2020].

8

9

Dinkel, p. 6.

10

Farajalla, p. 198.

11

Ibid., p. 198.

12

Gopal, p. 3.

Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2012).

13

14

Dinkel, p. 4.

London, 31th of January 2020

First-ever message exchange with ‘G’: ‘The man the myth the legend’

London, 31th of January 2020 First-ever message exchange with ‘G’: ‘The man the myth the legend’

4

Non-alignment:

CLOUDS

London, 20th of March 2020 Packing all of our belongings in boxes, leaving our home.

1 CLOUDS (Vignette: 3 minutes, 23 seconds) ■

I thought of ‘D’ now and then. Not often, but he came to my mind sometimes and I wondered what he was up to these days. Obviously, he was not running his coffee cart, but would he be able to survive without that? Was he planning to return to Slovakia? Will I ever see him again?

‘Who do you think you will never ever see again?’ ‘Č’ took some time and then started naming some of her former schoolmates who I knew she did not especially care about.

I thought of ‘D’ again.

■

‘I went to this interesting lecture about clouds the other day!’

I told him the last time I saw him.

The lecture was calming, beautiful and disturbing – all at the same time; and it left me with a weird feeling in my stomach – but I did not go into details about that with him. It was just a week before I decided to not leave my house anymore.

‘How there are different kinds of clouds: bomb clouds that consist of particles of buildings and even human flesh, toxic chlorine clouds that are heavier than the air we breathe so you have to run to the top of the building if you see one, clouds of smoke from forest fires, clouds of tear gas… And the funny thing is that they are organic and don’t understand, consider or care about borders.’

I went on.

‘It feels like this virus is the same. It does not really care about where and when it goes, it affects everyone…’

2 He started laughing.

‘You know who does not respect sovereignty either?’

I had no clue what was on his mind.

‘Birds and fish. They are like clouds; they go wherever they want.’

I found it profoundly beautiful. Birds, clouds, fish…. They go wherever they want, they do whatever they like. ‘D’ possessed the same cloud-like quality. He seemed like he made up his mind about things surrounding him already a while ago and he was not about to change for anyone. ‘...but maybe they could have a referendum about the virus here since they voted on the fish already! Whether they will let it in the country or not…’

He had his typical smile on the face again. He was full of sarcastic comments all the time I figured by now, and to be sarcastic you have to know things, have an opinion about them and be confident enough to express that – I respected ‘D’ because he was able to do that.

I think our time was up. I thanked him, waved goodbye and went my way.

I haven’t seen him since.

London, 20th of March 2020 Packing all of our belongings in boxes, leaving our home.

3 CLOUDS (Rumination: 4 minutes, 25 seconds) ■ The ideas of orientation and alignment – and consequentially non-alignment – are developed and put in the centre of the writing of Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion15 as well as Queer Phenomenology,16 where she notes: ‘The lines we follow might also function as forms of ‘alignment’, or as ways of being in line with others. We might say that we are orientated when we are in line. We are ‘ in line’ when we face the direction that is already faced by others. Being ‘ in line’ allows bodies to extend into spaces that, as it were, have already taken their shape.’17 Ahmed, through her critique of classical phenomenology, develops an argument through spatiality and situatedness that proposes a different mode of thinking about the way we are oriented, positioned and perceived in society. Queer phenomenology thus puts in question what is perceived as right, correct, accepted and how one ought to behave. This opens up a remarkable possibility: through orienting oneself in a way that is not aligned, one can operate in a new way and thus achieve a different kind of understanding of the surrounding world.

In a sense, a non-alignment Ahmed is proposing is very much analogical to what non-aligned movement represents as a political or ideological alternative, and what ‘D’ and myself suggest is a quality of birds, clouds, fish and viruses. Birds, clouds, fish, viruses and all other forms of non-human actors that do not comply with accepted ideas of borders are, following this argument, an epitome of nonalignment: their trajectories are not aligned to any kind of rational agreements that are perceived as the right ways of extending in the space, and the same goes for their elusiveness that cannot be grasped from a human perspective.

Eyal Wizman observes: ‘cloud dynamics is elusive, governed by non-linear and multi causal logics. This is a problem that persisted throughout the history of painting when clouds – moving faster than the painter’s brush could capture them – needed to be imagined rather than described. The contemporary problem of cloud analysis shifts rather from the physical to the epistemological. Today toxic fog breads lethal doubt, with negationists operating across the spectrum seeking to deny the facts of climate change just as they do of chemical strikes.’18

4 Smoke clouds caused by deforestation, clouds of acid rain, poisonous chlorine clouds, tear gas clouds disrupting peaceful demonstrations, or mushroom bomb clouds that are signalling destruction and revealing the area of their genesis but shortly after taking on a life of their own – have an intrinsic agency and do not abide by the laws, rules and agreements of humans. They are as non-aligned and as disoriented as it is possible and are extending into space in the most unusual ways.

‘D’s own pace of operating, his strong and revealing personality, his beanie, apron and a cigarette he would put out if a customer would step closer, sarcasm and all the things I got to know about him from the conversations we had contributed to the character that was nothing like the other baristas that I got to know – either too stressed out or too focused on their love of coffee. ‘D’ had his own thing going on, he was a cloud-like, utterly non-aligned individual.

The fact that this was the last time I saw ‘D’ could arguably only enhance his cloud-like-ness, and mine, for that matter: in the same way we first met, we drifted away – each in our own direction.

15

Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).

16

Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (London: Duke University Press, 2006).

17

Ibid., p. 15.

London, 20th of March 2020

Eyal Weizman, Atmospheres: The weaponisation of doubt (Architectural Association, London, 4 March 2020) Packing all of our belongings in boxes, leaving our home. [public lecture].

18

London, 20th of March 2020 Packing all of our belongings in boxes, leaving our home.

5

Non-alignment:

SEDIMENTATION

Land border crossing between Slovenia and Croatia, a no-man’s-land, 21th of March 2020 ‘Č’ in front of the sign declaring ‘the Republic of Slovenia’ and ‘European Union’

1 SEDIMENTATION (Vignette: 3 minutes, 56 seconds) ■

We received 6 packages on Friday and another 6 on Sunday.

We were supposed to get the rest today but the delivery guy stopped by the house and explained that he had so much stuff that he couldn’t fit the packages in the van. He asked if we wouldn’t mind – and we didn’t – if he could bring them tomorrow.

I found an oyster shell in one of the boxes while unpacking.

I brought it from Whitstable when ‘Č’ and I visited it last Easter, which was exactly a year ago. We had coffee and croissants on our way there, sitting on the floor of the overcrowded train. I wore my favourite shirt that day. Around noon we had prosecco and oysters, Whitstable is famous for, and afterwards, we strolled the town. We sat on the grass for a long time in front of the fortress watching elderly people playing bouls while having ice-cream. In the late afternoon, we had a lobster on the pier and ‘Č’ burst into tears at a certain point because she waited in a wrong queue for 45 minutes and as a result could not order fries – which sounds funny when I think about it now, but was a serious issue that day. She told me how she never feels to fit in and that she is not very happy with her current situation. At the time I was on the edge of breakdown as well because I hated my job. I remember regretting wearing trousers and not shorts since it was so warm.

Overlooking ‘H’s vineyard, holding an oyster shell, all these memories came vividly back to me.

It was Easter Sunday, exactly a year had passed since I picked the oyster shell from a large pile in Whitstable and brought it home. Now I had it in my hand again – somewhere on the other side of Europe, long forgotten, far away from its home.

I felt like crying again.

■

2 ‘G’ suggested that I should write to ‘D’.

I never considered this since I always felt like ‘D’ and I exist only at that specific place for the duration of a macchiato-with-a-bit-more-milk. Nothing more, nothing less. Everything outside of that would not make any sense to me before.

But now it might. I am sure it should not be too hard to find a guy with such a specific name, knowing exactly where he sells his coffee. There must be a way to figure that out. But I also was not sure if I really wanted to do that.

I really did want to know what was going on with him, though.

‘Do you think ‘D’ is ok?’

Although my question came out of the blue, ‘Č’ knew exactly who I was talking about.

‘I am sure he is. Maybe he returned home. Or he might be making coffee at the hospital for people working there now!’

I guess she was right. Although, knowing him the whole hospital thing was quite improbable, but he might have returned home.

Home. What does it really mean anyway?

Land border crossing between Slovenia and Croatia, a no-man’s-land, 21th of March 2020 ‘Č’ in front of the sign declaring ‘the Republic of Slovenia’ and ‘European Union’

3 SEDIMENTATION (Rumination: 3 minutes, 27 seconds) ■

‘Just as a river accumulates particles and deposits them as sedimented structures that direct the river’s flow, argued Merleau-Ponty, so we accumulate information as we go about our lives, which gradually and unconsciously builds into a contoured bedrock of understanding that guides our behaviour.’ 19 Jonathan Weber explains the concept of sedimentation, Maurice MerleauPonty established in his book Phenomenology of Perception.20 Furthermore, Webber introduces us to the ideas in the writing of Simone De Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon – about gender and race respectively, connected to the notion of sedimentation as well.

All three authors argue that throughout our lives, whether we like it or not, we are exposed to external factors, ideas, stereotypes, habits… that shape us and sediment in our behaviour. According to Webber, the writers do not take on a pessimistic position, but instead believe we are capable of breaking through these inherited ideologies: ‘We can reason about the attitudes that matter most to us, and we can reform our social environments. In both ways, we can actively reshape the sedimented outlook that guides our behaviour.’ 21 Concludes Webber.

However, one could claim that what Merleau-Ponty, De Beauvoir and Fanon do, and what Webber describes as sedimentation, is, in essence, a form of nonalignment. Is it not the reasoning and reforming of our social environments, essentially swimming against the current which is literally and figuratively a miss-aligning act? If this is the case, is it not true that sedimentation sits on the opposite pole of non-alignment?

An oyster shell represents sedimentation in its purest form. Calcium ions sediment themselves from the surrounding water onto the protein matrix to form a seemingly solid and unadaptable shell. After the life of an oyster has passed, a shell takes on a new function and transforms once again, this time serving as a basic building block of sedimentary rock that exists for thousands of years to come.

4 The collision of sedimentations is what probably got the best of me while holding the oyster shell that felt so out of place in my hand. I think that, to a certain extent, both ‘D’ and I helped each other to formulate conclusions at odds with our sedimented outlook.22 Neither him nor I ever fully sedimented into our surroundings. Perhaps it would take years, and with that, hectolitres of macchiatos-with a-bit-more-milk, infinite discussions about viruses, storms, clouds, birds and fish and us moving away from speaking in English while finding our way of collaging words and communicating with one another.

Yet, I suspect this is not the case. These exchanges are precisely what would – and someday hopefully will – enhance our non-alignment.

19 Jonathan Webber, ‘Sedimentation: the existentialist challenge to stereotypes’, Aeon, <https://aeon.co/ideas/ sedimentation-the-existentialist-challenge-to-stereotypes> [Accessed 23 April 2020].

20

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2013).

21

Webber.

22

Ibid.

Land border crossing between Slovenia and Croatia, a no-man’s-land, 21th of March 2020 ‘Č’ in front of the sign declaring ‘the Republic of Slovenia’ and ‘European Union’

Land border crossing between Slovenia and Croatia, a no-man’s-land, 21th of March 2020 ‘Č’ in front of the sign declaring ‘the Republic of Slovenia’ and ‘European Union’

Non-alignment The piece of site-writing puts in its centre the idea of non-alignment in the broadest sense of the phrase. Beyond describing only a political and ideological movement it expands the meaning towards defying what is considered aligned and as such agreed, compliant and labelled as correct.

The project explores how detecting, reflecting and thinking through different encounters from everyday life can offer an insight in what constitutes identity – both personal as well as cultural one – that is misaligned with one’s surroundings or situation. It investigates how identity is exercised in a global urban setting and how cultural and national identities are constructed through stories, historical accounts and anecdotal evidence. Furthermore, it addresses the language’s impact on the way one can be understood and how one is given a voice. Finally, it researches how different triggers, encounters, events and influences impact the development of personal identity and allow for people to connect through their non-alignments.

Through five different concepts of non-alignment: Strangers, Dual, The Basics, Clouds and Sedimentation the project reflects on lived experience and contextualizes these accounts through drawing on different ideas and theoretical concepts that help to create a new way of understanding the significance of these vignettes. This provides an opportunity to understand non-alignment as a possible mode of operating, providing new possibilities of comprehending one’s environment and existing in it.

The structure of the project consists of three main, reoccurring elements that intertwine and contribute to the whole: full-page images from a personal archive, assembled in chronological order relating (to a certain extent) to the writing, that also construct its own narrative; vignettes – encounters from everyday life that carry a personal and emotional significance to the author; and rumination – short texts that contextualize, theorize and provide an opportunity to create a new way of understanding described events beyond obvious. All of these elements together form an entity that aims to encourage a reader to question and research his or her own identity as well. The length of every encounter is limited to a duration – measured in time that correlates to the number of words – of preparation of a macchiato-with-a-bitmore-milk, reflecting and connecting to the lived encounters shared with ‘D’.

There are multiple tropes, characters and stories that connect the project as a whole.

The main story of a friendship with ‘D’, a central non-aligned character, that prompts a question of what it means to be a stranger and investigates how friendships can be formed in the most peculiar ways, serves as a thread of exploring these themes. The exploration of what home is and what kind of place one considers home, questioning what it means to fit in, aligning oneself with the lived environment and commenting on the social and political situation are all closely realted to the underlying issue of a pandemic that shifts and disrupts the established habits and turns out to be an act of non-alignment in itself: it forces one to abandon the rituals, rethink the way forward and move back home – whatever that really means, anyway.

Vid Žnidaršič Site-Writing Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL 2019/2020 Prof Jane Rendell Dr Polly Gould Dr David Roberts